American Scoundrel (4 page)

A commentator of the day said Dan possessed many natural qualifications for leadership—“a handsome face, a plausible address, quick wit and undaunting courage.” By 1846, because the Hunkers had the numbers, Dan had been elected as the youngest member of Tammany’s general committee, with the help of such potent allies as Captain Rynders, Captain William Wiley, leader of another handy Tammany horde, and a saloon-keeping demagogue named Fernando Wood, who would serve a number of terms as mayor of New York. Dan now became Tammany’s nominee for state assemblyman.
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Late that same year, a matter appeared on the record that enabled certain newspaper editors to denounce Dan then and later, when he became a more public political figure. He was charged with grand larceny for having stolen from Mr. W. Kemble a deed on the premises at 79 Nassau Street. The property actually belonged to Dan’s father, and Dan, always short of cash, raised an $800 loan from Mr. Kemble, giving him the document as security. When Mr. Kemble brought the deed back to Dan’s office one day to have the debt recorded upon it by the registrar, Dan said he would return it to Kemble as soon as that was done. According to the charges, when Kemble next asked about it, Dan said that the deed had been accidentally left at the registrar’s office. Kemble would claim that the foreman of the grand jury before which Dan was to appear had
warned him beforehand that “strong political influence would doubtless be exerted to get the accused clear.” When the mortgage was produced at trial, it was indeed seen to be registered in names other than that of Kemble, so the jury was directed to acquit Dan on technical grounds. Some years later, his lawyer, John Graham of the Graham clan of Tammany, declared it as his firm belief, when the story was raised again, “that in this case you were entirely innocent of the offense imputed to you.” Kemble had, inappropriately, used the criminal court for a civil case, because he had already failed in the civil case on the matter.
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Just the same, an air of financial corner-cutting, not wholly uncharacteristic of young New Yorkers, attached to Dan. One cause of his need of money was the infatuation he developed in his twenties for the clever brown-haired prostitute Fanny White, who worked at that time from a house on Leonard Street. Fanny was young, lively, someone in whose company Dan could be unreservedly himself. She was both beautiful and crafty, and lacked the air of victimhood that marked the hapless fallen girls of popular literature. Unlike a more conventional girl, she did not seek Dan’s fidelity and had no impulse to improve him; she sought only that he express his gratitude with gifts. She had, in fact, a talent for eliciting gifts of jewelry and real estate from exuberantly grateful clients. Dan was so taken with what she offered him— enthusiastic sex without complications—that he developed ambitions of exclusive access to her. It could be argued that Fanny was the object of the longest and most intense erotic concentration he would ever offer to a woman. But in Fanny’s case, exclusivity was not a cheap objective. By the summer of 1847 he shared her bed, and when Fanny’s servant was arrested for stealing money from Miss White’s rooms, the charge was that the servant had entered the room where White and her “man” were sleeping and had stolen the money from the man’s pocket. When the servant was tried in the police court, she cried, “You know, Miss White, that all I took was a bundle of keys from Daniel Sickles’s pocket while both of you were asleep, and you know that I took nothing else.” At this public announcement of Dan’s status as Fanny’s “man,” there was great laughter in the body of the court, and the story made the press. But Dan
did not appear embarrassed, because he had already proved willing to be seen in public with Fanny. It was a fascinating side of his nature that, as in London later, he would have his affair with Fanny publicly noted in a way he would never have permitted in his associations with married women or widows, or with young women who expected to achieve marriage.
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Neither the Kemble affair nor his love of Fanny prevented Dan from being elected to the New York State assembly in 1847. Going to Albany, he trailed behind him the further racy rumor that Fanny White had helped him with the expenses of his candidacy, by providing money earned in her Leonard Street rooms. Whether that was true or not, he did invite Fanny to visit him in Albany, and introduced her around the dining-room table at the hotel where he and other assemblymen stayed. He also arranged for her to tour the assembly chamber. Even for Albany this was too much. Though he may have asked his fellow assemblymen how they knew of Fanny’s profession—for though she generated occasional press notice, there was nothing about her appearance to distinguish her from, say, a successful actress—he was censured by the speaker of the assembly as a result of motion passed by the straitlaced Whig members.
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But this was a minor blemish on his career. He was elected a delegate to the Democratic convention of 1848, and acquired a further array of powerful friends, among whom were the Van Buren family and August Belmont, the representative of the House of Rothschild in America, and a renowned and cultivated German-Jewish entrepreneur. At the time of Dan’s attention to Fanny White, Belmont was himself courting the daughter of Matthew “Japan” Perry, the American naval officer who had opened up trade with Japan. In 1849, with Dan as a wedding guest, Belmont would marry her, and he remained a friend to Dan and a reassuring and stabilizing presence in the Democratic Party. Dan was wise enough, however, not to presume on his friendship with Belmont as a means of raising credit to finance his expensive tastes.
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Among the men he frequently met at Delmonico’s famous establishment downtown was the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest,
who long remained a friend, and toward whom Dan directed the adulation reserved in modern times for cinema stars. An assiduous theatergoer, Dan’s interest sometimes ran to Shakespeare and sometimes took him to Wallack’s Theatre, at Broadway and Thirteenth, called by one commentator “the best theatre in which the English language is spoken,” though it was devoted almost entirely to comedy. Dan still enjoyed grand opera greatly, and went on attending performances at the Academy of Music.
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The second half of the nineteenth century came in with expectations of technological, industrial, and political beneficence. For Assemblyman Sickles, it was a matter of making larger borrowings, and to pay them back he exempted himself from standing for reelection to the assembly and set to work again as a lawyer. A great deal of his correspondence received and sent would be concerned with balancing the settlement of one promissory note against the extension of another. Not all those who lent him money were indulgent.
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Fanny White, on the other hand, was less desperate for cash than Dan, and was able in 1851 to buy a property at 119 Mercer Street and run it as one of the city’s most prosperous, reputable, and well-appointed brothels. Her personal tax record of 1851 lists, along with herself, a certain Bagioli as the payer of taxes on the property. So was the father of the now-adolescent Teresa also involved with Fanny White, or had Dan used Bagioli’s name as a cover when helping White? There was a sniff of the tribal about Fanny’s brothel, anyhow, since she had bought her house from a lawyer of Dan’s, John Graham. These transactions were themselves an index of the dense, fibrous quality of relations between Tammany and New York’s vigorous unofficial life. George Templeton Strong, the New York lawyer and diarist, whose reminiscences are to his age as significant as those of Samuel Pepys to the Jacobean era, would say that Dan was blackmailing Antonio Bagioli, but there is no evidence of it, and Bagioli’s surviving letters to Dan were always unresentful and warm.
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In the early 1850s, Teresa Bagioli was a beautiful young woman being trained for the role of wife and cultivated hostess at the Manhattanville Convent of the Sacred Heart, the school for the daughters of the
Catholic elite of New York. Her complexion was transparent, and her soul also; she was blithe, an affectionate friend to her younger sister, Blanchy, and a good if sometimes naive conversationalist. Her openness and lack of malice, the lack of the vanity and self-indulgence that might have gone with beauty, earned her a wide circle of friends. One observer wrote, “Beautiful, brilliant, and highly educated, she mingled with the most garrulous simplicity of manner a firmness which, without sacrifice of feminine grace, exempted her from many foibles which spring from weak nerves.”

Though attracted to men by way of the sensuality she had inherited from Grandfather Da Ponte, she expected to enjoy the years of maidenly socializing that lay ahead of most of her fellow students and intimate friends before marriage. Their names and the innocuous, enthusiastic, chatty letters Teresa wrote to them evoke a dewy, privileged American wholesomeness: Jane McCarren of Westchester, Molly Coggin, Mary Hill, Sarah Shevell, Ann Hendrickson, Eliza and Sarah Sanford, and a special friend of unknown surname, Florence. Many of these letters would survive.
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But Teresa was besotted with Dan Sickles, who visited the Bagioli house regularly. Although Antonio had for a time done so well as a voice teacher that he had maintained a “country seat” at Hastings-on-Hudson, he too was a man doomed to economic uncertainty, and now he was back in the demi-squalor of town. George Templeton Strong implied that at one stage Dan’s frequent visits to the Bagioli household, at 34 East Fifteenth Street, were entirely predatory, and that, again, he was blackmailing Antonio. It was the sort of accusation Dan’s repute induced such folk as Strong to make. Unless Dan was extremely perverse and Teresa thoroughly alienated from her parents—and there is no sign that she was—an atmosphere of threat would not have encouraged her infatuation with this mature lawyer and politician who did her the notable honor in all conversation of considering her more than a mere girl. Dan was enchanted by her. He courted her with a sensibility of being a friend of her parents, and he must have suspected that he loved her with a fated and exclusive love.
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His passion for Teresa did not diminish his hectic devotion to the tribe of Tammany. It betrayed him into behavior that in other political jurisdictions would have led to his arrest and disbarment, but that was much admired by Democrats in New York. He was engaged in supporting a friend, Robert J. Dillon, for the elective office of corporation counsel, when the supporters of the opposing candidate prepared a circular against Dillon and enclosed it with a ballot in envelopes addressed to all the voters on the electoral rolls. Thousands of these circulars were taken to the Broadway post office for delivery. Informed of this, Dan gathered the cohorts of Captain Wiley’s and Captain Rynders’s gangs and drove with them in several carriages to the post office. There, in the words of one newspaper, the Tammany legionnaires “captured” the building, ripped open the mailbags, gathered all the offending letters into a pile under Dan’s supervision, and set fire to them on the post office floor.

Dan was, of course, prosecuted for robbing and interfering with the mails, but John Graham was able to delay indefinitely his appearance before Justice Osborne in federal court. Indeed, one of his rewards was to be elected a delegate to the Democratic Convention of 1852 in Baltimore, where he supported the ultimate victor, a handsome Mexican War hero from New Hampshire named General Franklin Pierce. And though the
Sun
would six months later urge President Pierce to give Dan short shrift in Washington, “and then forward the gentleman by the first train to the disconsolate and despairing justice,” Dan was correctly confident that he would never come to trial for his act of electoral enthusiasm.
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Though living so far north, in New Hampshire, Pierce was a pro-Southern Hard Hunker or, as people now said, Hardshell Democrat of the variety Dan liked. Many other Americans liked him too, and Pierce would sweep the country in the coming November, 254 electoral votes to 42. For the first time Dan had the heady experience of looking up to a President who acknowledged a measure of obligation to the young delegate from New York. Dan would, with a mixture of grace and directness, trade on this debt. He had a New York friend, a fire commissioner named Gus Schell, and Dan wrote to the new President to petition for
the appointment of Schell, “the fireman’s man in New York,” as collector of the Port of New York, a position that had always carried with it the most handsome fees and rewards. “I would venture to comprise all that I am permitted to ask from the present administration in one desire—that Augustus Schell may be appointed Collector of the Port of New York.”
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Now the story gets beyond its most significant element. A month or so before Pierce’s election, Dan had proposed marriage to Teresa Bagioli. It was not uncommon in that age for a fifteen-year-old girl to marry, though it was not particularly the practice of the world Dan and Teresa moved in. But Teresa was, in her way and for someone her age, uniquely qualified. Dan believed she possessed the gravity to be a successful lawyer’s wife, and her education and rearing in an exceptional family, as well as her frankness of feeling, better equipped her for marriage than were most American women in their twenties. She would always like older, apparently sager, and accomplished men, and was bedazzled by this mature, worldly, sympathetic New Yorker. We do not know the scene of her seduction—his rooms, a hotel, or a house of assignation, that is, one of the special hotels where polite women could go, wearing a veil, to meet their lovers. It may have been a tumult at home while her parents were away—although since Antonio had his studio at home, his absences were not frequent. Wherever the seduction occurred, it signified more to Dan than any of his past liaisons, and was a world-consuming and all-encompassing event for Teresa. As for Dan, with a sudden impulse of innocence, he sought a redemptive, wholesome presence. His life was complex to the point of chaos, and he looked to a girl who was less than half his nearly thirty-three years for a limpid center. It was a task Teresa was ambitious to take on. The date of the civil wedding at City Hall before Mayor Kingsland of New York was September 27, 1852. It was rumored that both sets of parents were against the union, and that Dan had exacted Teresa from Bagioli as a price for silence about an alleged earlier, Italian marriage of Antonio’s. But there is no evidence of that, and Teresa’s demeanor from the beginning was that of a blithe and beloved bride, rather than of one bartered. Dan and Teresa lived
with the Bagioli parents at Fifteenth Street, and if there was any residual
frisson
between handsome Maria Cooke Bagioli and Dan, it was something both of them committed to the past.